As personal AI agents become more common, Meta and a group of major companies are working on a new standard aimed at making it easier and safer for these systems to interact with businesses.
Meta, Walmart, Stripe and several other companies are introducing what they call a “personal agent protocol”. The open standard is designed to define how AI agents can interact with businesses and access their services.
Enterprise AI company Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is also part of the group. Taylor, who is also chairman of OpenAI and is leading the initiative, said businesses still need clearer systems to determine when and how personal AI agents can access their information.
“Companies will know when it’s a personal agent versus an actual person. For a lot of companies there’s a risk: you don’t want just a random bot that isn’t acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service,” Taylor said. He described the current situation as “kind of chaos until such a standard exists.”
Meta’s Muse has emerged as one of the most widely discussed personal AI agents since its launch in early September. It reached the top of Apple’s App Store, moving ahead of ChatGPT.
However, Amazon has blocked Meta’s agents over concerns about website scraping. The company has also blocked Perplexity’s AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging that it took steps to “conceal” its AI agents so they could continue accessing Amazon’s website without approval. Perplexity described the lawsuit as a “bully tactic.”
Taylor compared the proposed standard with the process of signing into websites using Google or Facebook credentials, a system he worked on while serving as technology chief at Facebook. He said the approach could help businesses authenticate AI agents and understand what they are doing on their platforms.
David Singleton, Vice President of Engineering and Consumer Products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former technology chief at Stripe, highlighted the security benefits. AI agents may need access to credit card and personal information to complete tasks, making visibility and user control important.
“We’re defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future,” Singleton said, comparing the system with email. He said a common standard could allow agents and businesses to interact more smoothly.
Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the U.S. and is “growing rapidly.” He cited tasks such as signing children up for classes, finding and buying gifts and scheduling long-delayed dentist appointments as examples of how people use the technology.
While OpenAI and Anthropic are not currently part of the initiative, Taylor said he expects major AI companies to participate. He also said he would be “really disappointed” if competitors did not adopt the standard.
“The whole point of this is to be an open standard,” Taylor said.
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